Currently, location information as it pertains to business activity is looked upon as a consequence of said business activity (when looking at the yellow pages, search by business type first, then find the address and telephone number). If business B1 runs a restaurant a location L1, and business B2 offers wi-fi connectivity at same Location L1, the information about L1 is going to be collected and managed separately and for different purposes by B1 and B2. The “place” will be described differently, the street address expressed differently, the name of the business will be described differently (ex: McDonald's #123 vs. McDonald's Washington St vs. MacDonald's Restaurant)
Currently, location information is used as a semantic construction to describe where a physical place is (postal addressing standards historically derived from necessity to classify, organize and find places) but there is no generally adopted system to describe places which do not have a postal address, although any physical place on earth has a unique combination of latitude and longitude
It is desired to consider a business activity as a set of attributes specific to an entity performing a business activity at a given location to enable management of location information in an advantageously new way.
Referring to FIG. 1, which illustrates a conventional product-location specific data collection method, consider that at time 1, entity 1 creates a record of location 1 because of instance of product 1 at location 1 called product-location 1. For example, McDonald's (entity) creates a record of a new restaurant (product) at 123 Main street in Oakland, Calif. (location), resulting in: McDonald's #3487, 123 North Main St, Oakland, Calif.
Then consider that at time 2, entity 2 creates a product-location record 2 at the same location. For example Wayport (entity) creates a record of a new wi-fi hotspot (product), resulting in MACDONALDS, 123 MAIN N, OAKLAND, CA (location).
Clearly, the two locations are physically the same or at least they ought to be deemed identical for certain purposes. However, they may well be read as two different locations, e.g., location 1 and location 2, due to their different expressions of the same physical address. It is desired to have a system which puts the location object at the center of the model and system, rather than centralizing an entity or product associated with the location, or a combination of entity or product with the location.